Here you'll find the book musings of three people:Leonie Flynn, Daniel Hahn and Susan Reuben - editors of the Ultimate Book Guide series

20 June 2009

Booktrust Teenage Prize

So, with the massive reading challenge completed (108 books!) the Booktrust Teenage Prize judges met two days ago to discuss...

With me on the judging panel were librarian Judi James (who was our chair); journalist Alyson Rudd; teen novelist Marcus Sedgwick, himself a former winner of the BTP; and Aniketa Khushu, one of last year's teen judges.

I am not, of course, going to tell you what we chose - the longlist will be published very shortly; but it's good. And the meeting was good, too; we had some interesting discussions about particular titles and also (especially) about criteria in general. There were some books that had unanimous or near-unanimous support, which was satisfying; others that had just one or two really passionate champions. Everyone had to make some compromises and see some titles they loved fall at this fence, but on the whole we've come up with what I think is a strong, interesting, varied list. I'm very pleased with it, and hope you like it too.

I'll post again when it's been announced, and when that happens I'll also write a bit about a few titles I really loved out of this process that unfortunately didn't make it onto our longlist (in some cases which I've been wanting to blog about for ages but haven't wanted to say anything that might compromise the secrecy of the judging...). Till then, though, any guesses? What recent teen books would you have chosen?

3 comments:

Noga
said...

mmm... I can say that I'm a bit at a disadvantage because I didn't read anything but one book on the Guardian list and I'm sure some of these will make an appearance here as well. I would say Exposure by Mal Peet, The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness (which is better than the first volume in my opinion), and Stolen by Lucy Christopher - because I read those and liked them.Noga

OK, leaving out the books that aren't eligible, I'd say that the books I've enjoyed most have been Julie Hearn's wonderful Rowan the Strange, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night. Of all of them I probably want the Hearn to win!